BOOK REVIEWS FROM A CURIOUS MIND: I read a lot. Books and the data/stories contained within them are my oldest friends. Working at the University of Houston allows me to use the M.D. Anderson Library. Awesome! My wife mentioned that I should write up short summaries/observations on the books I've been reading, since people might be interested in reading them, so I did. Comments are welcome.

RXTT's Top 10's

Monday, October 1, 2018

The animal life around us is more interesting than we could ever imagine

The
Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary – Caspar Henderson
(2013)

Bestiaries are bad-ass.I even like the word itself (a collection of
beasts!!!).For the most recent human
history, bestiaries were collections, much like encyclopedias and atlases, that
sought to compile the whole breadth of the animal life found in a specific area
of the world.Ancient Greek and Roman scholars
would compile these amazing bestiaries, mostly based on word-of-mouth and
accounts brought back from intrepid sailors.Because their sources were never actually verified, many of the entries
found in these old bestiaries are either for wholly made up animals, such as
chimeras, unicorns, and gryphons, or they were for severely misidentified and
poorly described animals, such as the rhinoceros, which was originally thought
to have armored plating, and whose horn it was said would spew fire when the
creature was angry.While many of these
descriptions sound poetically correct, (you do NOT want a 2 ton rhino angry at
you.You will swear he has fire shooting
out its snout as it comes to wreck you up.Also, its thick, folded skin, does indeed look like armor plating,) they
were not up to the veracity needed to function as true scientific
categorization.

Around half a decade ago, author
Caspar Henderson started to
think about animals, specifically the ones that are surprising to
encounter.These animals are so amazing,
so unique in their morphology or their behavior, and so different from the
standard animals we humans find ourselves exposed to, that they may as well be
mythical.He began to do the research
that led to this book.Mr. Henderson’s love
of nature shines through in his writing.He has chosen one animal to represent each letter of the alphabet, and in
each chapter he manages to not only describe the amazing animal in question, what
we know currently about its life, physical properties, and behavior, but he
also explores the way humans have discovered these details, how humans used to
see these animals historically, and the possibilities inherent for us in
studying these magnificent creatures.

I am a huge nature nut, and I am
always in awe of the seemingly inexhaustible variety of form and function that
life has taken on our lovely planet Earth.I was quite familiar with some of the animals in this bestiary, and I
was completely ignorant of several of these creatures.I learned quite a lot about or fellow
animals, and was left with a distinct impression that, for all we humans know
about life and the universe around us, what remains to be known is so vast, and
so completely unpredictable to us, that it shines a harsh light on the selfish
way we humans treat our Earth and its fellow inhabitants.We are all in this together, whether prey or
predator, scavenger, or parasite.The
more we know about the world around us, hopefully the less we will take it for
granted.When we destroy nature we are
destroying ourselves.

Feedback from the Intellectual Journey

"I love the bluntness of those opinions man!" - !@#$%!

"Hi! I've seen you on the internet..." - Jeff Vandermeer(Author - Area X Trilogy)

"(One) of the relatively few reviews of [Jerusalem] to focus seriously and appreciatively on the subject that it was most concerned with, this being the eternity of the poor, and of the neighbourhoods that house them." - Alan Moore (Author - Jerusalem, Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta)